Blogs and Self Promoting

Okay, I'm still pretty new to this whole blogging thing but when I learned that Diana Peterfreund was getting complaints on her blog , because she wasn't just talking about writing topics, but was using the blog for promoting her great book, I had to give my head a little scratch.

I mean, isn't self promotion what a blog is all about? Whether you're doing it for commercial purposes or not, if you're gabbing about something in public, you're self promoting. (or at least doing it to grab attention, even if it's anonymous)

This debate (that I didn't know existed until today) reminds me of the early days of the web. I was working at the Price Waterhouse World Firm Technology Centre at the time, which was in Menlo Park, CA just north of Silicon Valley. The place (tech centre, not Menlo Park) doesn't exist any more... which is sad because it was a very cool place to work. Anyway, most of my coworkers had Phd's in artificial intelligence and other areas of computer science and had been using the internet pretty much since they'd started university (some in the 70's). One day I asked my friend Jeff how someone like him had ended up working for a public accounting firm and he told me that with a degree in AI it was hard to get a job not involving guiding missiles... Since the internet was first used to facilitate sharing information between DOD scientists, it makes sense that these guys had used the internet for years... But I seriously digress...

My point was (I did have one) that a lot of these guys took great offense when corporations started to register domain names and use the web for commercial purposes. The first URL the tech centre had (I think we may have been the first accounting firm, perhaps first commercial entity, to have one?) was actually registered under the Stanford University URL. Those were the days when if I searched for my name on Yahoo (no google then) I'd get 4 hits and they were all about me -- academic papers I'd written etc. Now when I google my name I get 440,000 or so hits most of which aren't me... OMG. I just googled my old friend and coworker Jeff Delisio, with whom I cowrote some papers and who has a much less common name than I, and there are still links to some of my old papers! (digressing again, sorry)

Anyway, a few of my coworkers at the tech centre (or people they knew), seemed to feel that the web should only be used to:

• make sharing academic papers easier than it had been with only ftp and


• share cool stuff like photos and music with their friends who had the time to download stuff like that with the painfully lacking bandwidth most people had at the time.

So learning about the complaints Diana's getting on her blog took me back to 1993.

It's like as soon as a new technology catches on and people are smart enough to use it for commercial purposes, the early adopters get all up in arms. I kind of understand that... it can kind of take the fun or community feeling out of something if others use it for commercial purposes... but seriously... You can't live in the past.

Signed, Maureen...
Who started this blog largely to self-promote future books and plans to promote the books of her friends until she has one of her own. Anyone who finds that offensive, don't read my blog.